I
have taken to going to church. I haven’t found God, although he is probably
right where I left him, but I enjoy the experience. Not in the William James Varieties of Religious Experience sense,
you understand, but I like the cool interior of the building, the quietly
spoken people who shake your hand, the sense of a shared and gentle
spirituality prevalent among the religious here in Costa Rica. Taxi drivers
cross themselves as they pass the Catholic church, the Immaculada, and there are religious festivals throughout the year
which are a pleasure to see. The church is well attended and, on occasional
Thursdays and Fridays, as I wait for a driver to take me and others to do
voluntary work at the local animal shelter, you will find me there. And,
naturally, one’s thoughts tend to turn toward religion.

Religion,
for the elites and the media, as well as the SJW contingent, is neatly divided
in two, and polar responses are required for orthodoxy to reign, as it always
must for the Left. Islam is the religion of peace, and terrorism is not
connected with it. Terrorists are not Muslims, no matter how often their expert
scholars say they are or what they shout while butchering Europeans or their
fellow citizens who happen to be Christian. Christianity, in bold
contradistinction, must be suspected, banned, harassed and blamed for all the
supposed ills of the West. The use of language and its control are paramount
here. Thus, when the ridiculous show-pony Justin Trudeau says that ‘honour
killings should not be called barbaric’, he is not saying that they are not
barbaric. He is saying that you, little people, are not permitted to call them
by that haram appellation.

There
is a playbook of Liberal responses to criticism of their beloved Islam. One of
them is that all religion is tainted
by exhortations to violence. I don’t think this is true of all religious
creeds, but the debate is only ever intended to defend Islam and defame
Christianity, so you will forgive me if I forego a detailed examination of the Vedanta or the Upanishads.

As
I sit in the church here, however, I spend some time looking at the central
image of violence and two things occur to me. The first is that the violence
visited against Christ – who I believe existed – is not a rallying cry for
violence against anyone else. The Bible may
have violent sections, but the iconic image connected with Christianity is the
cross seen as the reminder of Christ’s agony, not a thumbnail blueprint for a training
manual for the Ku Klux Klan.

Now,
quite apart from the fact that parts of the Koran make American Psycho read like The
House at Pooh Corner, it seems to be the case that the book is an
ideological and social instruction manual for much of the Muslim world. And
that world is changing its geographic distribution, like a very high-stakes
game of Risk. The Koran has over 100
graphic commands on the killing and maiming of the kufr. One of the weakest bits of Liberal jugglery is that the Koran
is always misinterpreted, and can only be read in the original Arabic. This is
bollocks on stilts. While Kant and Heidegger, say, may be problematic in
translation, this is because they contain complicated and metaphysical abstractions.
The Koran – or the holy Koran, to use BBC-speak – is a series of
simple commands. You could translate it into any language and it would still be
telling madmen in comedy beards to chop up Jews between prayers. It says what
it means and means what it says.

The
next piece of Liberal humbug is that it is only a very small percentage of
Muslims who pose any threat to the West. Again, this is pathetic and willfully
misleading. It is only a small percentage of an army that will kill the enemy.
The rest are radio operators, paramedics, sappers, logistics officers and so
on. Although they will not kill you themselves, they are on the side of the
guys in the front line with the rocket-launchers and assault rifles. So it is
with Islam.

The
Islamic army of occupation – for that is what it is de facto – currently turning parts of Sweden and France into
literal war-zones poses an added threat. As the police continue to exercise the
bare minimum of authority towards criminal migrants, there is a second level to
the anarcho-tyrannic strategies of which they form a part. The goading of the
indigenous population is an integral part of anarcho-tyranny and, when the
inevitable vigilante pushback begins in earnest, then we will see the police clamping
down hard on what they will see as dissident action. And so the Sovietisation
of the West proceeds through the form. That Muslim immigration is beneficial to
anyone but the elites and their catastrophic plans is a miserable lie.

And
miserable lies are now the currency of the West, and these lies will kill the
innocent again and again. Except, of course, for our mortal enemies on the
Left, white Christians are never innocent but guilty, as guilty as Pilate found
the man hanging in front of me on the cross. One thing I know to a certainty
concerning the Catholic church here – and there are two other denominational
churches in the small town, plus a Jehovah’s Witness meeting hall - which
no one in Europe could ever say about their church. It will never be a mosque.

A
note in passing. The church I have described has fourteen windows on either
side, arched and unglazed and unbarred. They sit about seven feet from the
ground and it would be the work of seconds to scramble up to a ledge and drop
down into the silence of the church. Once inside, as is usual with Catholic
churches, there is enough gold to make such an incursion worth your while. It
is inside glass cases, but that will not stop the determined. As anyone who has
ever broken into a building via a closed window will know, one simply takes
honey, a newspaper, and some leather gloves with one. Smear the honey on the
glass, apply the newspaper, and put your gloved hand through it.

Now,
I think that in this rather light-fingered land, there are two possible reasons
why the treasure of the Immaculada remains
in the clutches of the church. Firstly, there is a local code among the
criminals on this particular run of the Pacific Coast. There have been dark
mutterings even a straniero like me
has picked up on the radar. Petty criminals who go too far, who rob the wrong relative
or generally exceed an unwritten and Mafioso-style
set of protocols, often evade the clutches of the local police, a fairly
lackadaisical, affable bunch. But sometimes they fall foul of their co-workers,
and can end up being tossed off the Crocodile Bridge, a structure whose nick-name
needs, I feel, no explanation. The police are, understandably, reluctant to
investigate these events, although apparently one or two bleached skulls have
washed up on the river banks. It could be that. But I prefer my second
explanation. The local bad guys don’t steal the church gold because they are
scared God will see them.

One
last church, which it may well one day be. When I was a small boy, I went to
Primary School in a village called Chaldon, in Surrey. It makes me sound posh,
and we weren’t, but the village had a famous church dating from the 11th
century and mentioned in the Doomsday
Book. In the 1950s, workmen discovered a large mural across one wall.
Dating from the 12th century, it is supposedly one of the first
English wall paintings. The area was apparently owned by a knight, and I
suspect he was a Templar, which would explain the crois epaté at the bottom of the tableau. There is a passable
reproduction – post-restoration – at the head of this piece. It is a familiar
judgement tableau.

The
mural rather frightened me as a little boy, as it was intended to do when it
was created all those centuries ago. It also puzzled me that there were two
devils in Heaven, along with the hippies in nighties. They were being tortured
and made to perform tasks, all right. But they must have used Jacob’s Ladder to
get there. Devils in heaven are all very well, as long as they integrate. What
if the angels lose control of them? Worse, what if their fellow demons become
bored with torturing the damned and decide to make use of Jacob’s Ladder
themselves…

Friday, 17 February 2017

I
love Twitter spats. I hope the company doesn’t fold, because some of the fun to
be had there makes me want to ride a bike up a hill. The Left, of course, are
the principle source of amusement. Nothing cheers me more than to race across
the lawn of the internet, leap Stalky-like into the dorm room of Twitter, and
open the toybox in which I keep my Leftie chums. The only thing I enjoy more
than a wrassle with a Leftie is a dust-up with a Leftie journalist. I realise
that the phrase ‘Leftie journalist’ is a pleonasm but, pace Leibniz, this is not the best of all possible worlds.

David
Aaronovitch is, in my opinion and as I told him on Twitter, one of the most
over-rated journalists currently working in the UK media. His latest opinion
piece assured us that ‘populists’ – and populism is the new racism – will not
be gaining power anytime soon. Apart from being wrong – see Geert Wilders, for
example – this stance exemplifies the attitude the media have towards the
ordinary person, the little people, me and you. They despise us. ‘Populism’
even comes from populus, the Latin
word for people. What Aaronovitch is saying is that the people and their votes - what the vapid android John Major recently called 'the tyranny of the majority' -
will not triumph, will not take part in preventing the type of globalist craphouse journos
would be quite happy to impose on the rest of us, so that they can have a good
laugh from their gated communities at the little people making soup from
cardboard boxes.

So
I told him what I thought, not expecting that he would get involved or reply
any more than Diane Abbott did when I called her a disgrace to black people,
Alastair Campbell did when I asked him whether he could sleep at night, or
Anjem Choudary does when I ask him endless questions about Chas and Dave.
(Example; ‘Imam. If Chas and Dave revert to Islam, will they have to shave
their beards and grow new Muslim ones?’) And I feel anyone on Twitter is fair
game. It is not The Vienna Circle. So I was shouting down an empty well, as
usual, or so I thought. With David Aaronovitch, however,I was wrong.

Boy,
did he bite. He obviously had a peek at this weblog, an internet site so influential
that it is clearly worthy the attention of time of journalists employed by the
world-famous The Times. I wonder
whether his employers know he spends his time looking at this filth. I shall
have to ask them. Here, with intermissions, is the conversation we had on
Twitter, that halfwit agora, that idiot’s debating chamber we love so much. My
comments are italicised, David’s stand erect:

·Aaronovitch is one of the most over-rated journalists
writing in the UK.

Now,
I take this truth to be self-evident. The usual suspects we know about:
Toynbee, Bunting, Clark, White, Fisk et
al. But I put Aaronovitch on a par with someone like Howard Jacobson. It’s
all comfortably numb, Leftist, north London navel-gazing. No pressure, no
literary élan, no incisiveness, just a suave Leftist intellectual lockstep.
Popular, of course, in the way that Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga are popular
despite being anodyne. It’s just that the popularity of these journos doesn’t
extend outside of a sort of virtual Islington. My American reader will have to
look that one up.

These
writers, you see, are little more than corporate bloggers annoyed that chavs
like me are allowed into the party, even though I’m lucky to get 100 readers a
day while these guys are read – for the time being, at least – by tens of
thousands. But let us move on. David, as I say, obviously swung by Traumaville,
and was concerned at what he ‘read’. Behold.

·"I’ve just visited my local
supermarket, in which I swear I was the only white face." Where was that?

·Costa Rica, you
oaf. Read the whole fucking piece.

·No. It wasn't. The 'fucking piece'
said it was a town in the U.K. So where was it?

What greatly concerns me here is that
a professional journalist can read an opening paragraph, even one in a pissant
blog such as that maintained here, and just not
get it. I was going to refer you to the paragraph in question but, of
course, silly goose that I am, I forgot that you can just scroll down to my
last post and see it for yourselves. I suggest you do. *Whistles a popular tune*
Ah, so there you are. We swashbuckled on;

·David, you must read the paragraph again. I
may have to speak to your employers about this. Read it again. Don't look
foolish.

·And also, once u've named it tell
us more abt the "Pansy Left" and women who are "egregious
porkers".

·The Pansy Left
was a phrase used by George Orwell in a letter. Egregious porkers are fatties.
Next Q?

·See David? You
are just not as good as you think you are. I'm going to refer to you, from this
day onward, as Dunning-Kruger.

·Have you got all
busy, Dave? You are my next blog post, amigo.

·Um, it doesn't
say women. It says Americans. Get a sub to help you if you can't keep up, Dave.

Now, I admit that I am a nasty little bastard on Twitter but, as mentioned,
that is for me a part of the pleasure of the platform. Social media should be
rough and tumble. I had to shed a lot of old ‘friends’ on Facebook (although
they were once genuine friends) when they scolded me for making political
comments that were not in alignment with
their Leftist world-view. They littered Facebook – or LongFacebook as I christened
it after Brexit/Trump – with their Leftist bollocks, but say a word about
cautious immigration, say, or Muslims, the new Jews, and fuck me did they come
down on you like a sack of hot horse-shit. But I digress.

·Accepted. I had Breitbart interested in
this spat for about 5 minutes. But all is now quiet on the Western front.

·I don't give a monkey's about
Breitbart, Mark.

·I suspect that to be something of an
untruth. Much like my original statement concerning them. Good day to you.

·And I
believe I stole that conceit from the opening to Waugh's Handful of
Dust. I'll check.

In
closing, a few points.

The Left
are extraordinarily thin-skinned. I have one Twitter adversary, Jamie
McDonald, whose Twitter profile reads as follows;

I'm not
pretending to hate you, I actually fucking hate you. All Opinions my own, who
the fuck else would they belong to? Not a Blairite, thanks.

Tough, two-fisted stuff, you’ll
agree. He even has the Twitter handle @JamieMcBastard. But when I sent him a
link to this blog as a little tease, he reported me to the company for ‘spamming’
him. Baffled, I explained to him that spamming is a phenomenon restricted to
email. Twitter is, if you like, constant spamming. All comments are
unsolicited. If you don’t like it, my opinion is that you should fuck off to
your safe space. I mentioned to Jamie that he would be in this posting, and do
you know what he said? He said this.

·If you’re
writing about me you either need to get out more or consider a trip to Dignitas.

Extraordinary
on two counts. Firstly, as Old Traumavillians know full well, I am in the Costa
Rican rain forest. When I pause from my writing, it is usually to look up at a
passing Toucan, White-faced Capuchin monkey or Scarlet Macaw. And the
occasional sloth. Where does he suggest I ‘get out more’ to? Croydon?

Secondly,
Dignitas is the famed centre – in Switzerland, I believe – for assisted
suicide. Is he suggesting I kill myself? Or is this a veiled threat? If it were
a threat, and I were him, I would be whining to Twitter or the police now. And,
to look at his profile, he himself belongs in jail simply for wearing that tie.
I told another Twitter Leftie recently that I could find out where he lived – I
can, there’s a trick to it with Twitter – and he included the Twitter handle
for the London Metropolitan Police in his reply. Their skin is so thin that the
finest gossamer is stout protection by comparison.

But to
return to David Aaronokvetch. Sorry, Aaronovitch. I bear him no animus. I don’t
know him. But I am concerned about three things.

He failed
to read what I had written. I was a sub-editor for ten years, and failure to
read accurately is a cardinal sin.

He has not
read Eric Blair’s letters.

On
believing that I was attacking women – I wasn’t – exhibiting homophobia – I wasn’t
– or being some Ukipper Colonel Blimp – I’m not – he was as triggered as a
Black Studies student in a London university who has just been into the library
and seen a copy of Conrad’s Nigger of the
Narcissus.

As we
know, the UK print media are not hiring. ABC figures are looking as healthy as a
publisher who has decided to bring out a pop-up edition of Mein Kampf. The Guardian and The
Independent may not be around this
time next year. The Telegraph is haemorrhaging
jobs faster than Kellogg’s. The legacy media will last Mr. Aaronovitch’s life
time, but his children may have to seek alternative employment. The reason?
Populism. That is, the people. They are beginning to wake, as though from a long sleep.

Monday, 13 February 2017

I’m
English, I’m from London. I was born in the north of the city, grew up – or at
least got bigger - in the south, and I’ve lived east and west too. Now, things
have changed. I’ve just visited my local supermarket, in which I swear I was
the only white face. No one spoke my language. I even had trouble making myself
understood at the checkout. The whole town is the same. These are not my
people. I don’t recognise this as my home town, the one I grew up in. And I put
the whole thing down to immigration. I should know. It’s not my home town.
Things have changed. I’m the immigrant.

As
both my regular readers know, I re-located to Costa Rica in Central America a
little over a year ago. I was bored with spending my time in London either in
the pub or getting fired for not kissing the arse of management companies, and
the chance came to try something – and somewhere – new, and I duly took it. I
have a few loose ends to tie up in London, but when they are firmly tied, I
will be staying here and looking to gain permanent residency. Staying in
Britain, or anywhere in Western Europe, seems to me about as sensible as
staying in Pompeii just as you are feeling the ground beginning to tremble.

Were
I a Pakistani Muslim wishing to live in London, of course, the path would be
swept of leaves as I rode triumphally into town. It isn’t as easy in Central America.
And if I came here and asked for welfare, or social security benefits, I would
be greeted with a broad grin, the one you generally find on the faces of those
people who have just heard something genuinely amusing.

My
biggest disappointment, however, was finding out that I am not a gringo. Apparently, you have to be an
American – a north American – to qualify. I am merely el inglesé. Crazy inglesé, on occasion. I am, and always have been,
un poco loco. There are plenty of gringos here, however. Oh, yes. I saw
one of them yesterday, waiting at the bus stop with her two friends, waiting
for the bus that would take them to the world’s 12th most beautiful
beach.

She
was about 17, unattractive, a bit of puppy fat, but not an egregious porker as
so many Yankees are nowadays. The most interesting thing about her, however,
was her T-shirt. It featured a cartoon of the president of her country and bore
the legend; Fuck Donald Trump. A few
initial points.

A
year previously, someone wearing a T-shirt reading Fuck Barack Obama would quite possibly have got themselves into a
spot of legal bother. Trump, however, is fair game, what with being a white man
and all. The Yanks here would certainly have no issue with this silly little
bitch’s apparel. They are almost unanimous in their vocal denunciations of
Trump. They are also pig-ignorant when it comes to politics of any kind.

Secondly,
I am something of a prudish conservative when it comes to public displays of
profanity. I myself swear to an extent that would blanche the face of a
docker’s tart, but I would never swear in front of children. The children here
are charming and well-behaved, and I have seen them in some amusing – and
English-language – T- shirts. Go Climb a
Cactus. Your Hashtag means Nothing to me. Learning English is important to
the locals for a number of reasons, and I really don’t think that this little
slut should parade around in a country in which she is a guest with the word Fuck emblazoned across her tits.

Thirdly,
it is becoming the signature of the Pansy Left in the west that politics is a
game of slogans. What you must never do is to enter into reasonable debate with
someone holding diametrically opposed political views to yours. Instead, plenty
of exclamation marks and upper-case slogans, lots of dumb, ape-like chanting at
interminable rallies, marches and demonstrations, and the reduction of valid
criticism to some stupid cunt walking around in someone else’s country with a
T-shirt reading Fuck Donald Trump. I
wished, silently and fervently, that she ran into some good old boys, like my
neighbor, a country singer and military veteran.

Ultimately,
one becomes so tired of the Liberal-Left. The combination of raw stupidity,
foam-flecked anti-white invective, virtue signalling, hatred of home, the
worship of celebrities, a visceral hatred of education, rigorous and psychotic policing
of thought and word, and lack of social skills become like that dreadful moment
on a crowded bus when you realise both that someone has emitted a particularly
obnoxious fart and that there is nothing you can do about it.

The
most telling thing is when Yanks meet someone such as me. English, urbane,
educated and intelligent, a talented
musician and general wit and raconteur. And modest to a fault. They all of them
assume that I am effectively wearing a T-shirt reading Fuck Donald Trump. It would never occur to them that I might think
that Trump is the last chance for their country, and Obama and the Clintons
should be buried together in a hole in the Nevada desert. And that is because these
Americans themselves are, virtually speaking, all walking around with T-shirts
reading Fuck Donald Trump. If you are
what they deem a good person, like them, one of the Gütmenschen, you are in the club, the good person club. Where
right-thinkers go. The intellectual landscape prevalent in Orwell’s 1984 had more colour than the denuded mental
scrubland of these fuckers.

The
Left are now incapable of debate. Slogans will do. Look at the gormless
placards at any Leftie march, strewn all over the street like an insane woman’s
excrement. Twitter is infested with these patsies. Now, winning a Twitter
argument is like winning a game of rock-paper-scissors in a psychiatric hospital,
but debate in the sense that I understand the word is just not possible in 140
characters. Therefore, I have given three of them my email address – mark_gullick@yahoo.co.uk by the way –
and I haven’t heard a fucking word. Slogans are easier than good old Platonic,
Enlightenment debate.

In
a decade or so, the girl in the T- shirt will probably be on the right side of
history but the wrong side of the Walmart checkout. Late for work, she will be
chewed out again by her Hispanic team leader. She is searching in her clothes
drawer for something to wear under her work shirt that reads I’m here to help! or Just ask! or some other slogan intended
to belittle her and remind her of her status. In one of the drawers, crumpled
into a corner, is a faded T-shirt she has forgotten about. She pulls it out and
looks at it. Tears start in her eyes. It reminds her of her holiday in Costa
Rica all those years ago. She looks at the faded cartoon. She has tens of
thousands of dollars’ worth of college debt, and all it bought her was a degree
in Kill Whitey Studies or Feminist Gobshite Studies, something utterly useless
both in the employment market and in her head. America is great again, but not
for people like her, who don’t know anything worth knowing, and are only equipped
to think in Touretter spasms of emotive nonsense. She looks at the T- shirt.
She thinks; why has my life come to this? I was right. I was right.

Monday, 6 February 2017

When I was a
young teenager, like many boys of my generation, I devoured science fiction. I
could often be found with my snout inside some garishly covered paperback by
Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Dick. With this in mind, my mother
organised a birthday present when I was around 14 or 15 which no young boy
could have failed to love; two tickets to a London lecture by Isaac Asimov.

It was exciting
and wonderful. The great man, with his mutton chops and fear of flying (he had
come to Britain by sea), talked of many things and captivated us all. The high
spot – and I see it still in my mind’s eye – was when we were invited to ask
questions at the end, and he spotted a young lad in garish trousers and
accepted his question.

I asked Dr.
Asimov – he was a scientific historian in his own right – if he felt that it
was the duty of the sci-fi writer to prepare the rest of us for the future. He
praised my question – something I will never forget – and said, yes,
essentially it was. Asimov was an exponent of ‘hard’ science fiction – the type
that adhered to conceivable physical laws – rather than the ‘soft’ variety that
became so faddish afterwards and segued into some of the dreadful fantasy
nonsense one sees nowadays. For a non-scientist like myself this is a difficult
division to grasp, and I dearly wish I had my battered paperback copy of one of
my favourite science fiction books, containing as its foreword a brilliant
discussion of this very topic by Brian W. Aldiss.

The book in
question is Roadside Picnic, by the
Russian – then Soviet - Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris. I came to the book
via Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker,
the first film I had seen since watching Hitchcock’s The Birds as a child whose images haunted me and haunt me still. It
also contains Tarkovsky’s brother Arseny’s poem Now Summer Has Gone…, which became one of my favourites. The
Strugatsky brothers wrote the screenplay to Stalker,
although the film is a loose adaptation based on just one of the novel’s four
sections.

The premise of Roadside Picnic is that earth has been
visited by aliens who did not stick around long. This is not one of those
Mexican stand-off, Independence Day-type
scenarios. What the aliens did do, during the short duration of what is known
as ‘The Visitation’, is to leave various items inside a mysterious area known
as ‘The Zone’. The government wants these objects for research, both ethical
and nefarious. Collectors want them for curiosity and cash value. Others want
these blasphemous things destroyed. But the only ones able to retrieve the bizarre
range of physics-defying objects from The Zone and brave its deadly
unpredictability are the stalkers, men on the cusp of sanity who both fear and
yearn for a return to The Zone. We follow Redrich Schuhart, a stalker, for
three of the book’s four sections as he comes back from The Zone with a
fabulous and sometimes deadly treasure trove. There are myths and legends
surrounding the stalkers and the objects they retrieve from the strange
pathways of The Zone. And then there is
the fabled Golden Sphere, which will grant the finder his innermost desire,
whether he wants it or not…

This is not
space-suits and rockets sci-fi, not a western in outer space or a bunfight with
marauding aliens. The aliens are never seen, and there is no clue as to who
they were or where they might have returned to. There is only The Zone, with
its mystifying objects, some entertaining, some valuable, some deadly. This is
not intended as a spoiler – Ursula LeGuin gives the game away anyway in the
foreword to the Kindle edition – but the novel takes its title from a throwaway
comment made by one of the workers at a research institute, who has a theory
about the real meaning of The Visitation;

‘“Certainly,”
said Valentine. “Imagine a picnic – ”

Noonan jumped.
“What did you say?”

“A picnic.
Imagine: A forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the
meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor
radios, cameras… A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the
morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects, that were watching the
whole night in horror crawl out of their shelter. And what do they see? An oil
spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about…
Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The
wheels have tracked mud from some god-forsaken swamp… and, of course, there are
the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles,
someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins,
wilted flowers from another meadow…”

“I get it,”
said Noonan. “A roadside picnic”.’

This is the
beauty of the book. It is about the search for meaning with absolutely no clues whatsoever. Everything
about The Visitation is a conundrum, including the almost erotic yearning of
the stalkers to return to The Zone. Take one of the objects, the highly prized
‘empty’. An empty is comprised of two copperish discs a couple of feet apart,
as thought they were the two ends of a cylinder. But there is nothing in
between. A hand can be passed between them, but the discs themselves cannot be
moved in relation to one another. The teasing descriptions of the alien
detritus are one of the most entertaining features of the book.

Roadside
Picnic is a science-fiction novel about the
impotence of science in the face of mystery. When science cannot explain, it
becomes scared. The effects of The Zone are far-ranging. The stalkers have
mutant children. Curious and terrible things happen to those who move away from
The Zone and the areas they move to. And still the inventory of mysterious and
dangerous objects grows longer as the stalkers return with their plunder.

But this is
Soviet science fiction, and there are other considerations than that of plot
and mood, ideas and quests. Although I began by bemoaning the fact that I do
not have with me my battered old copy of Roadside
Picnic and its marvellous foreword by Brian W. Aldiss, the Kindle edition,
as well as Ursula LeGuin’s foreword, has a curious appendix which I found
almost as fascinating as the book itself.

The Afterword
is written by Boris Strugatsky, and is a small diary of the genesis and
eventual publication of Roadside Picnic. The
first and most delightful fact is that the word ‘stalker’ was brought into
Russian by the Strugatskys as a description of the semi-sinister prospectors of
Roadside Picnic. It came not from a
simple etymological derivation, but from Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co, his short novel of artful public school boys amid
the gathering storms of war. The novel was a favourite of Arkady Strugatsky.

But what makes
the afterword frighteningly contemporary is the inevitable struggle with the
Soviet censorship board in order to have Roadside
Picnic published. As Boris writes;

‘I’ve preserved
a remarkable document: the page-by-page comments on the novel Roadside Picnic by the language editors.
The comments span eighteen (!) pages and are divided into sections: “Comments
concerning the immoral behaviour of the heroes”, “Comments concerning physical
violence”, and “Comments about vulgarisms and slang expressions.”’

What follows is
eight years of bargaining, nit-picking, endless correspondence, the rumour that
the Politburo wants nothing more to
do with the brothers, and a final victory Boris calls ‘Pyrrhic’. The purpose of
all of this is the purpose of Communism itself, the ritual humiliation of all
those who do not agree that two plus two equals five. It is coming to the West,
with its attendant train of censorship and, eventually, prison sentences for writing
the wrong words in the wrong order.

In the modern
West, of course, these things are not done by centralised government. They are
farmed out to the private sector. Do you think that if you wrote a novel in the
UK whose elderly white heroine was bemoaning the effect Islamic immigration has
had on her town, it would be published? Would your book about black gang
violence be published by a known house? Milo Yiannopolous’s upcoming book has
already led to threats against the publisher Simon & Schuster.

Roadside
Picnic is vital on three levels. As a
science-fiction novel, if you are an aficionado
of the genre, it is unmissable. The film is beautiful, but is one to be watched
on a big screen. And as a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ against the monolithic Soviet, science
fiction indeed prepares us for the future of writing in the West, just as Isaac
Asimov told a young boy many years ago that this was the way science fiction
ought to function. I don’t, however, quite think that this was quite what the
good doctor had in mind.

I’ll leave you
with Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem, from the film Stalker:

Now the summer has
passed.
It might never have been.
It is warm in the sun,
But it isn't enough.

All that might have occurred
Like a five-fingered leaf
Fluttered into my hands,
But it isn't enough.

Neither evil nor good
Has yet vanished in vain,
It all burned and was light,
But it isn't enough.

Life has been as a shield,
And has offered protection.
I have been most fortunate,
But it isn't enough.

The leaves were not burned.
The boughs were not broken,
The day clear as glass,
But it isn't enough.

The
one prediction I would make about the current wave of anti-Trump-inspired
protests is that somebody is going to die soon. That’s how it is with violence.
And violence is, as the young people say, ‘trending’. I rather like the idea of
things ‘trending’. On social media, as you and I sip our cocktails and idly
attempt to toss horse-shoes over pegs in the ground, pegs placed there by our
servants, topics are trending all over social media like button mushrooms in a
dewy morning field. Various hashtags pop up their little heads, courtesy of a
collusion between the Left and their compliant social media babysitters, and by
golly there’s a trend.

Do
you remember #BringBackOurGirls, #IllRideWithYou, #NeverTrump,
#ThisIsWhatAFeministLooksLike ? Of course you do, although you may wish you
didn’t. They are, essentially, graffiti on a special-needs playground wall. A
hashtag is what you do when your impotence has been set free by social media,
when the need to virtue-signal is so strong that you have to express it, even
though you are not yourself actually virtuous. Then, when you see that your
Leftist, Progressivist, millennial, snowflake, anti-racist, Islamophile,
fascist-hating hashtag is starting to trend, you can feel the warm glow of
being on the right side of history. What never seems to trend is reality. And
the reality is that somebody is going to die soon. If or when that happens, and
depending on who it is that dies, we may well move into an entirely new phase
of this incipient civil war.

If
Milo Yiannopoulos is to be the Archduke, and this is not impossible given the
scale of violent protest at his speeches, then who will be his Gavrilo Princip?
Princip was the young Serb who killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo
in 1914 with a home-made bomb, and effectively started the First World War. Whether
or not there will be a civil war in the USA, that possibility is more likely
now than, say, a year ago, when Trump was a laughing stock Yahoo having a fun
day off from the office. Now that he has achieved what we, the people, were
told was an impossibility, everyone even vaguely connected with the Alt Right
is increasingly at risk from the aggravated assaults becoming a commonplace at
Leftist ‘protests’. Look at Richard Spencer’s slug to the jaw and the
pepper-spraying of a Trump-hatted woman at Berkeley. Either of those could have
been a knife. Violence is in the air and threatens the luminaries of the Alt
Right. Yiannopoulos is no exception.

The
violence that now routinely erupts at Milo’s campus talks is becoming ever more
audacious. Of course, much furore attaches to just how much of a spontaneous
eruption these chimpouts are, and the name Soros is never far away from rumours
of funded violence and paid agitators. Aided and abetted by the police – apparently
told to stand down at Berkeley – these protests are becoming more and more
chaotic and aggressive. It will not be long before someone is murdered.

What
has happened since last year’s extraordinary and historic election is
unprecedented, I believe I am right in saying, at least in my lifetime. For a political
establishment bar none, in league with the MSM in its entirety, academia in toto, the public sector, social media
CEOs, Uncle Tom Cobley and all to be so blatantly devoted to the horrid
down-tumbling of a democratically elected president is the stuff of fiction. In
this case, the truth is definitely stranger.

The
boots on the ground for this extraordinary anti-Trump coalition are the people
who set Berkeley alight, and their ilk. Chancers like Soros provide the payroll
for this blitzkrieg, but the black-clad anarchists, the pussy-hatted
feministas, the social justice warriors, the Black Lives Matter fatsoes, the various
Islamic agitators and the well-meaning fellow-travellers are being motivated by
what can only be described as an epistemological sleight-of-hand.

The
Left are making the most extraordinary existential category mistake, made even
more extraordinary by the fact that there is no mistake about it. A deliberate
inversion of the usual meanings of words, an old Leftist trick, and of the
range of effects of the language those words belong to, is funding the current
mini-riots. What is happening, on an epistemological plane, is this.

The
Left are equating ‘violent’ speech or text with actual violence itself.
Furthermore, ‘violent’ speech or writing is not defined as language endorsing,
inciting or describing actual, physical violence, but is viewed as speech or
text which does conceptual violence to their cherished and immovable ideas. One
of the defining traits of the modern Left is that Groupthink, intellectual
lockstep, and the solidarity that comes from all hating the same enemies are
the equivalent of not just a written constitution, but an actual set of
physical rigidities such as Newton’s Three Laws of Thermodynamics. To disagree
with the Left is, for the Left, to wound and kill, to threaten and menace. If
you said it, it exists in the real world, like Adam naming the animals in Eden.
Wordsare real things and events to the Left.

Once
this conceptual Pepper’s Ghost is put in place, and imaginary violence takes on
a phenomenological reality that enables it to be labelled as ‘violence’, actual
violence perpetrated by the Left becomes a justifiable and morally correct
response. This is a very dangerous place to be. Curiously, the looking-glass
world we now inhabit is summed up not by a thinker or intellectual, but by
ex-England soccer player Gary Lineker. He stated in a Tweet that the world was
drifting towards the ‘Alt violent Right’. Of course, we may feign surprise that
people pay attention to an ex-soccer player turned pundit, but we live in a
time in which members of one profession – preferably one within the entertainment
industry - are routinely, and even compulsorily, expected to shed light on
areas which ought to come under the rubric of quite another.

Of
course, the vast majority of violence is emanating from what we might call the
Alt Left, but as I have pointed out, violence for these people is not an event
in the real world, but an impertinence on the part of the Right when commenting
on events, a refusal to come into line with management-style, immutable
protocols. But this makes little or no difference when you are on the side of
the angels, and the Left are so quasi-religious now that they resemble a sort
of cross between Puritans, the Spanish Inquisition, and the self-flagellating
millennial hordes described in Norman Cohn’s brilliant book, The Pursuit of the Millennium.

If
Milo is ever lying on a campus tarmac, breathing his last breath while looking
into the face of a paramedic, it will be little consolation to him to know that
he took a couple in the back because of a category mistake. But with members of
the media and the political establishment openly calling for the assassination
of President Trump, I suspect we will not wait too long before the Alt Right
has its personnel depleted by some Gavrilo Princip, Mark Chapman or Jack Ruby
of the Left. Then the stakes, and with them the nature of the game, will
change.

Thursday, 2 February 2017

Blacks nourish and take pride in an intense, combative
racial consciousness. It is only a matter of time before this gives rise to an
explicitly white racial consciousness.

Jared Taylor,
White Identity: Racial Consciousness in
the 21st Century

This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll. This is genocide.

David Bowie, Diamond Dogs

Following on from the thread of my last postcard, in a piece of
continuity that is – as you have correctly noted – brilliant, I’m beginning to
wonder whether the decline and fall of the West 2.0 is not only developing into
a wonderful piece of theatre, but also, if that is the case, whether we would
not be best advised to take our seats and adjust our opera glasses. The chorus
of aggrieved women alone who are having what must, clinically, be described as
breakdowns, would serve as the Bacchae, and you can tattoo that on your arm, so
true is it. But hysteria is not confined to the political Left…

The new kids on the block, the young Turks of the Alt Right, are getting
themselves into a lather about ‘white genocide’. Now, I know what they mean. It
does look an awful lot as though the elites are attempting to scrub the white
man from the picture, in the same way as Stalin had his pre-Photoshop experts
retouch photographs to remove images of non-people who had crossed Uncle Joe. And
they are using the usual suspects in politics, academia and the bizarre fantasy
worlds of social justice and feminism to do their dirty work for them. Academia
is abuzz with Ice Whitey Studies and suchlike. White privilege is the flavor of
the decade for the Left and blacks. There are talks, seminar courses, degree
courses, articles and blog posts everywhere whose topic is how it is time to
replace white folk with… well, with what?

White genocide is not happening, and for a number of reasons. Firstly,
whites are not being slaughtered wholesale, which is the meaning of ‘genocide’
still, even in these times of shifting semantics. The West is not Zimbabwe or
some other pissant ‘black-run’ failed country. The Armenians or Rwandans would
have something to say about describing a few Liberal college professors and
their gormless Leftist students, plus the chimpout brigade at Black Lives
Matter, as carrying out genocide. Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter,
incidentally? Did the basketball season start?

Secondly, who does anyone think will replace the white man following
this supposed genocide? The black man? Good luck with that. And I am not
sitting here writing this swathed in a bedsheet and wearing a cone-head. White
supremacism is not something basement Nazis support at torchlit night parades.
It is self-evident, like gravity. White men built history, and must now
maintain it in the face of the many-headed hydra of Liberalism. This is partly
what Trump signifies. The enemies of white men are not predominantly black men,
or even Muslims, but other white men and, in particular, Liberal white women.

The answer is, I suspect, white secession and separatism. This is
already happening in places like New Hampshire, but it is also happening on a natural
scale with the phenomenon of white flight, wherein white people move away from where
black people live and live somewhere where other white people live. Obama
tried, naturally, to put a stop to this with his Affordable Housing Act,
otherwise known as bussing in dysfunction, but hopefully Trump will have strangled
that vine by now.

Liberals, who see racism in the very patterns of the air, view white
flight as racist, as though trying to protect your family from what Paul Kersey
calls ‘Black-run America’ were somehow reprehensible, but as a phenomenon it
will surely catch across Europe soon like a bush-fire. Germans are already
beginning to move to Hungary. Eastern Europe seems the only sane white portion
of the globe left. Liberals do not find themselves quite as popular in Estonian
universities as they do at Berkeley.

The white man’s burden never went away, it just changed its clothing to
something more ridiculous and began speaking in ebonics and hipster slang. I
wish I could find the essay from a collection recounting white teachers’
experiences in predominantly black high schools. At one point, a white woman
teacher asks a particularly exasperating black ‘student’ what he thought would
happen if whites left town and left blacks to their own devices. The kid
smirked and replied; We screwed. But if white flight becomes white fight, the
black/Liberal alliance may be screwed in more ways than one. Again, I am not
cheerleading. But a friend of mine and I agreed a decade ago that, if genuine
Conservatives did not begin having mature debate about immigration, black
dysfunction, Islam and radical Leftism, the nutters would eventually kick-start
the debate themselves, with a strong emphasis on the kicking. Then white flight
may become the least of Liberal snowflakes’ concerns…

Speaking of white flight, you may be aware that Richard Spencer,
self-styled ‘leader of the Alt Right’, was punched in the face by an ‘Antifa’
last week. You may even have seen the video. It was described as a ‘sucker
punch’, but it wasn’t. A sucker punch is one that is set up, like Reggie Kray’s
‘cigarette punch’. Spencer was just assaulted by an assailant who then ran
away. Spencer himself walked away, rather sensibly and undramatically. For how
much longer will white people walk away from black and white Liberal
provocation? To dust off one of my favourite quotes – surprisingly from the
otherwise useless John Major – concerning the response of an Englishman to
having his foot stepped on. Step on my foot once, I’ll apologise. Step on my
foot twice, I’ll apologise. Step on my foot a third time, I’ll knock you down.

If whites, by whom I mean at the moment the organised Right, but whose
numbers will swell if a depression hits, decide they have had their feet
stepped on for a third time, it will be worth pulling up a deckchair, cracking
a cold one, and watching the show. This ain’t white genocide, this is rock ‘n’
roll.

Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Anarcho-tyranny is a program which, if it doesn’t actually exist, behaves exactly as though it does. This
may be a clumsy attempt to reduce the strategies involved, but here is a
suggested ten-point plan by which the elites, in conjunction with their useful
idiots on the Left, promote anarcho-tyranny in the West:

·Import and maintain dysfunction.

·Goad the indigenous
populace.

·Weaken educational
standards.

·Weaponise culture.

·Subvert the function
of the police.

·Normalise the denial
of biological fact.

·Massively boost
management.

·Maximise
surveillance.

·Control the media.

·Deny all of the
above.

These are in no particular
order, although some are more obviously connected than others. The connections
are just as important as the points taken separately. As Aristotle wrote in the
Metaphysics, the wise man sees cause and effect. A brief overview of
each point, then.

Import and maintain dysfunction. This
is happening most obviously in Europe. Muslims, in particular from the Maghreb,
are being shipped into Western Europe in an obvious ploy to destabilise the
indigenous culture. With African populations about to starburst, there is no
theoretical upper limit to the invasion. Muslims are perfect for the elites, as
their culture – Islam – is utterly inimical to what remain of Western values.
Immediate friction will therefore result. This connects the importing of
dysfunction directly with the second category below.

As for the maintenance of
dysfunction, this is achieved by hyper-complication. The massive growth in Tolley’s
Tax Guide under UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is a perfect example of
this. Hyper-complication also functions through needless regulation, excessive
bureaucracy and, as we shall see below, a totally unwarranted expansion of management,
particularly in the public sector.

Goad the indigenous population. This
is done in a number of ways. Fear of bombing, stabbings, vehicular attack and
general anti-social behaviour keeps the populace frightened and wary, as well
as questioning what they have done to deserve this. Islam is the ideal tool for
this approach to anarcho-tyranny. Taxi drivers who refuse to take guide dogs,
supermarket assistants who refuse to sell pork or alcohol, preferential
treatment for Muslims requiring healthcare, welfare and education are all tried
and trusted ways to irritate the host peoples. The ongoing war on Christmas,
enforced school visits to mosques on pain of a racism record for refusal to
attend, special dispensations at swimming pools and preferential employment
opportunities are some of many expedients. A tension is built up between
immigrants and natives, and this is further exacerbated by vastly differing
custodial and judicial attitudes to immigrant crime.

Weaken educational standards. This
is one of those statements one takes to be self-evident. Education has been
possibly the most socially engineered area of society in my lifetime, certainly
in the UK. The role of the family and home life in teaching behaviour and
accepted social norms has now been taken over to disastrous effect by
politicised schools, while education of genuine worth has been constantly downgraded
at the same time as grades have been artificially upgraded. Parents who attempt
to make up this educative deficiency by home-schooling have many obstacles
placed in their way. Home-schooling is illegal in Germany. With higher
education, the ethnic cleansing of the syllabus and curriculum ensures that
political correctness dominates instead of genuine study. Also, the recent
emphasis on a university as an ideological environment rather than a place of
learning distracts students from the onerous task of actually studying.
Finally, the replacement of the classical disciplines – again, likely because
of the implicit links to white races – has led to the introduction of largely
meaningless degrees requiring nothing other than pre-conceived ideas and strong
and unswerving opinion.

Weaponise culture. It
is a well-known fact that if a person has any affiliations not approved by the
political Left, they will not at any point be working for the BBC or many
British newspapers, and will indeed find it difficult to get any work at all in
the culture industries. As for programming, we have recently seen a suggestion
that awards are withheld from productions that do not feature sufficiently
multicultural casts, a transsexual storyline in one of Britain’s dreadful soap
operas, and the usual gaggle of distressed and petulant actors hooting and
braying about Donald Trump. Culture in the UK is a weapon of the state, and
television is its avatar. Television teaches you two things. Firstly, it
teaches you how to watch television. It informs you of the little mental flips
you need to perform to tell an advert from a drama from the news. Secondly, it
teaches you that you should and ought to watch television. To do otherwise can
leave time one one’s hands, and the devil makes work for idle hands…

Subvert the function of the police. This
is complex but essential to anarcho-tyranny, as the police are the provisional
wing of elite power. The police will arrest, broadly speaking, who they are
told to arrest by Downing Street, and the operatives selecting the targets are
driven by political agendas. It is now, surely, common knowledge to all but the
ignorant and the Left – who are wilfully ignorant – that Western policing is
increasingly concerning itself with non-violent crime, and spending more time
trawling social media for thought crime and what a German Minister called
‘wrong opinion’ than in attempting to shut down injurious acts.
Rainbow-coloured police cars to encourage the reporting of LGBT-phobic crime.
Policemen standing with a Muslim, grinning inanely and making the one-fingered
ISIS sign. An advert by West Yorkshire Police for recruits featuring a Muslima
in a hijab. All of these are essential to the dismantling of police authority.

As an example
of how policing has been stymied, the regimen of the average rookie police
officer is summed up by a pseudonymous policeman – PC David Copperfield – in
his book Wasting Police Time;

“The signs
were there on my first day at training school. I joined the job in my late 20s,
a married man with a mortgage to pay and several years working in industry
behind me. I finished on the Friday afternoon and turned up at police
headquarters on the following Monday morning wearing my old work boots and with
the oil and dirt from the factory still ingrained in my hands.

Three days
later, we were still talking about prejudice and discrimination; burglars had
to wait while we set about changing the racist, homophobic and male-dominated
world in which we lived… Nobody seemed very interested in telling us how to
investigate crimes, or about the actual criminals themselves.” (Location 396)

The justice
secretary at the time – I forget his name, but they are all interchangeable –
at first called the book as fictional as Dickens, then was forced to row back
and admit its accuracy.

Normalise the denial of biological fact. By
encouraging even young children to question their biological gender, more
confusion and distraction are sown throughout society. Transgender toilets are
a novel element in the goading of the populace noted above. There now
supposedly dozens of genders, and people can also ‘self-identify’ as being a
different colour from that which they actually are. You can even be ‘Otherkin’,
a phrase I urge you to look up if your mood is in need of a lift. Note that the
elites use the fact that the Left see absolutely no argument against taking a
position simply because that position cannot be, cannot exist anywhere in the
world. Truth, objectivity and the realm of facts are all moveable feasts to
Progressives, malleable and available for use in the war of rage against
ordinary people.

Massively boost management. This
move works in conjunction with the maintenance of hyper-bureaucratic
dysfunction requiring ever-more government. Modern British management bases its
practice on fixed, static models rather than organic growth of natural talent.
It specialises in demanding that non-management underlings duplicate their
workload by echoing it in pointless reports. It is obsessed with useless
training schemes poorly taught. In particular, it is obsessed with diversity
training and, with new genders, cultures and immigrants in plentiful supply,
there will be no shortage of these non-courses. Management consultancy, in
particular, is an effective ruse for preventing efficiency. I worked with a
board of directors all of whom were consultants. One of them described his job
as ‘training people to get through interviews’. What is wrong with simply being
interviewed, without having been primed in such a way that the interviewer has
no idea of your genuine range of ability? Management comes in the guise of
efficiency and expertise. Beneath this disguise is the crippling of talent, the
complication of simple process, and the sheer wasting of time which could be
more usefully employed.

Maximise surveillance. Surveillance
is, of course, not at Orwellian proportions quite yet, but the big difference
is that, in Orwell’s prophetic novel, everyone is under genuine surveillance.
That is not really the case in the West, where terrorists can often strike
after having been on intelligence radars for some time, while those with
problematic opinions expressed on social media may not escape so easily. What a
German minister recently called ‘wrong opinion’ is more to the taste of the
police now than chasing down boys with knives. It is, of course, a lot easier
to arrest and intimidate white middle-class people who have a bone to pick with
immigration policy than it is to tangle with feuding Armenian and Turkish gangs
in Wood Green.

Control the media. To
control the media, it is not necessary to own it. But the parameters of what
can be reported and what can be said about what is reported should be strictly
controlled and regulated to ensure that no dissident journalism makes it into
the MSM. So we discover now that David Cameron attempted to have Paul Dacre of The Daily Mail fired from his job for
having too strong a tone in favour of Brexit. The Leftist-Progressive-Globalist
bias of the BBC scarcely needs to be pointed out, but even supposedly
Right-of-centre outlets push the same agenda, albeit in a ‘soft’ way. This
relates to the ‘soft despotism’ of de Toqueville, under which the populace is
being controlled but is not aware of the control. Orwell’s 1984 is, of course, a key text to understanding thought control of
the masses.

Deny all of the
above. In particular, go after those who
point out the Emperor’s lack of attire on social media. The bosses of Facebook,
Twitter and so on will help you, because you have made them feel they are playing
at the heart of the geo-political game. Denial is also part of the new Great
Game, like those card games in which one is forced to lie – and always rather
enjoys it – in order to win the hand. And it bears pointing out that we are
only playing dummy hands at the moment. I don’t believe the competition has
started yet.

Anarcho-tyranny
can only work in a society whose members have been duly prepared. Citizens
should be atomised and left with no transcendent cultural options. They must be
de-educated, so that even the common sense which is the birth-right of all is
replaced with anti-natural – and mostly anti-white – propaganda, misinformation
intended to ward off the possibility, which governments dread, that citizens
may, for example, use the internet to educate themselves. The paths to wisdom
must be closed down and, once they are, anarcho-tyranny looks not so much like
the machinations of a totalitarian despot, but the benevolent helping hand of a
caring state.

It
must, of course, be phenomenally enjoyable to be able to play this kind of
game for the rich, powerful, and the connected. The model of playing God is not apt. It is more like an assemblage of the
Ancient Greek gods, constantly deceiving one another and men – and women. Yes, I’m
looking at you, Leda – in their pursuit of order from chaos. And, just as we
still read the Greek drama, history and philosophy in which these Greek gods
play their cosmic and often malevolent sports games, so too we enjoy it. We like the anarchy, the
reckless use of power, the shape-shifting. As for the contemporary version, I’m actually starting to enjoy it myself.